Timeline of 20th c. Art and New Media

Timeline of 20th c. Art and New Media

Click for detailed image.

Most timelines of art, as found in classical texts, end at Pop art in the 1970s.
This Timeline of 20th c. Art and New Media was created to include relationships between art, new media art, science, technology, war and media theory.
Included in the timeline are:
– Major movements of 20th c. Art colored according to their degree of “subjectivity”, or rejection of logic/war, as indicated by writings. Purple = More subjective, avante-garde. Red = More structuralist, formal.
– New Media Art after the 1970s, with movements running in parallel
– Consumer Art, including comics, animation and video games
– A few key artists are shown for each movement.
– Rise of the avante-garde in Europe, and Rise of science in America, shown as increasing gray bars.
– Major wars shown in red, with thickness roughly indicating number of lives lost. (Eg. World War I = 16 million. World War II = 65 million)
– Major theories in other fields impacting art, including Saussure’s linguistics, Freud & Jung’s psychology, and Barthe, Strauss & Burnham’s semiotics.
– Media theorists (at top), including Walter Benjamin, Marshal McLuhan, Greenberg, Virilio and Manovich.
– Important moments in 20th. science (at bottom)
– World population increases for every 1 billion people.

For a more complete analysis of this timeline, see the posting Subjective Media: A Historic Context for New Media in Art.

Permission is granted to use this timeline for educational purposes to students and teachers, with copyright mark maintained. Permission is not granted for commercial uses (please contact me).